Space Nazi Paper I

The author (my former housemate) is an expert on X-ray polarimetry and AGN, so why he's decided to do this I have no idea. It's quite fun though. I had a not inconsiderable hand in correcting the text prior to submission.

Basically he's written a code to try and estimate whether a population could survive in isolation given the effects of inbreeding and overpopulation, here applied to a multi-generational interstellar mission. The clever bit, as I understand it, is tracking the histories of each individual to calculate the degree of inbreeding. The deleterious effects of inbreeding are applied quite crudely, reducing lifespan by some value if above some threshold (neither of which are well-known, but can be adjusted). It can also apply an artificial breeding programme, in the sense of forbidding breeding between individuals who are too closely related.

Here he investigates three possibilities : 1) A small population (150) who are insanely horny and don't care a jot about food supplies, incest, or have any common sense - unsurprisingly, this doesn't work very well; 2) A small population where the number of births is tightly controlled but no other regulations are applied - this works much better but it's not great; 3) A large population (14,000) with the same simple population controls, which succeeds.

Oddly, he doesn't actually use the code's capability of limiting inbreeding. He mentioned something about that needing improvements, but I never found out what exactly. Also the populations of both the small and large (controlled) populations show an initial increase followed by a slow, prolonged decrease of a very similar pattern over time. I'm not sure why that should be, but it's worrying. I also never really understood why the populations are given such restricted initial age ranges (a crew entirely of twentysomethings running a starship ? hmmm...) - that just leaves it more vulnerable to disasters.

What I hope will be tackled with the second paper would be an attempt to find the smallest number that could survive the mission given sensible population controls and natural breeding restrictions (e.g. Jamie and Cersei aside, hardly anyone is going to fool around with their siblings). Of course in a real interstellar mission you'd just take along frozen genetic material and eliminate inbreeding with arbitrarily small populations, but it would be interesting to find the point at which that's not necessary.

I believe the intention is to make the code public (surely this could be applied to the Sims ?) but this isn't the case yet. My guess would be it's not quite in a sufficiently clean state for public distribution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08649